QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Merging Accounts

Suppose you find multiple accounts for the same purpose lurking in your Chart of Accounts—Postage and Mail Expense, for example. Rather than punishing your QuickBooks experts, it's more productive to merge the accounts into one and then reiterate the account naming rules to everyone who creates accounts in QuickBooks. If you haven't gotten around to setting up an account naming convention, see page 36 for some guidelines.

When you merge accounts, QuickBooks sweeps all the transactions from both accounts into the account that you keep. Each type of account has a distinct purpose, so you can merge accounts only if they are the same type. As an experienced manager, you can imagine the havoc that merging income and expense accounts would cause in your financial statements.

Note

If you find two accounts with similar names but different types, those accounts might not represent the same thing. For instance, a Telephone Ex. expense account probably represents what you pay for your monthly telephone service; the Telephone Eq. asset account might represent the big telephone switch that your mega-corporation owns. In this situation, the accounts should be separate, although more meaningful names and descriptions would help differentiate them.

Here's how to eliminate an extraneous account:

1. To open the Chart of Accounts window, press Ctrl+A. Then, in the Chart of Accounts list, select the name of the account that you want to eliminate and press Ctrl+E.

   The Edit Account dialog box ...